FRIENDS – friendship-based regulation of individual emotions in networks in daily situations: An EMA study on partner–motive pairing and social outcomes in adult friendships

BACKGROUND: Interpersonal emotion regulation depends not only on which strategy is used but on whom people turn to. Previous work suggests that individuals select regulation partners according to their perceived competence for a specific emotion. We examined whether this extends to regulatory motives, and whether partner-motive pairing is associated with better interaction outcomes, higher psychological well-being, and lower social loneliness. METHODS: In a preregistered 14-day ecological momentary assessment (EMA) study, 106 adults reported on their friend contacts at four semi-random prompts per day (2,796 contact reports). For every contact, participants indicated the primary benefit they had hoped to obtain (one of six affect-improving regulation strategies), the friend involved, how far the contact had helped, and their evaluation of it. Partner-level pairing was quantified with a Specialization Score and, for interaction outcomes, with a leave-one-out residual separating motive-specific pairing from a partner's overall involvement; network-level pairing with a Network Specialization Index (NSI). Motive-specific pairing was tested against participant-level permutation nulls and with a residualized metric. The strategy a friend actually used was not assessed. RESULTS: Evidence for motive-specific pairing beyond a partner's overall involvement was limited and motive-dependent: under the permutation null no motive survived correction for multiple testing, and the residualized metric indicated motive-specific channeling only for problem solving and distraction. An exploratory network-level index standardized against each participant's own permutation null exceeded chance on average (d = 0.36) but reached significance for only 18 of 104 participants. Neither the leave-one-out predictor nor the network-level indices were associated with perceived emotion regulation effectiveness, interaction evaluation, psychological well-being, or social loneliness. These null findings were robust across alternative metrics, indices, ordinal models, and random-effects structures. CONCLUSIONS: Participants repeatedly paired particular partners with particular motives. Beyond the concentration of contact on a few partners, this pairing was small and was detectable mainly in an aggregate network-level test, and it was not associated with better interaction outcomes or better psychological adjustment. The findings caution against inferring functional specialization from partner-selection data alone and underline the distinction between network indices derived from self-reported contact reports and the subjective experience of support.